a blog of Dirk Eisenberg

Azure Costs: Cost Management for CSPs

Today we are happy to announce the availability of Azure Costs for Cloud Solution Providers.
Cloud Solution Providers are facing a serious challenge concerning the Microsoft Partnership. The whole process of generating transparency for consumed cloud resources of their customers, managing the billing process and offering support is on the cloud solutions providers desk. Our cost management for CSPs has the intention to deliver all the tools a CSP needs to implement this part of the value chain. The offering targets three important dimensions a cloud solution provider needs to cover:

Manage customers, accounts & partners

Azure Costs allows to manage all accounts, customers & partners in the complex n-tier business model of the Microsoft CSP Program. This includes a custom spending portal to analyse and manage the performance of every partner and customer including alerts and the powerful mail spending report. Supporting custom markups, discounts and margins allows to adjust the cost structure to the dedicated business model of every CSP.

Offer billing portal capabilities

Staying on top of the cloud usage is easy for CSP customers when their KPIs are right in front of them. The Azure Costs Spending Dashboard provides a clear and crisp overview, containing all important cost- and usage-KPIs at a glance for all CSP cloud customers and partners. Last but not least the billing portal offered to every partner and customer allows to deliver the required transparency a CSP is enforced to offer not only for Azure but also for other services like Office 365.

Multi Clouds & Custom Solutions management

Including self-developed cloud solutions and 3rd party services in the spending management infrastructure gives customers a single pane of glass to track, optimize and govern their spendings. As an essential part of the Azure Costs infrastructure, it opens the platform for other cloud vendors like Amazon and Google as well as sub cloud providers like SendGrid. The ability to build and sell cloud solutions e.g. hosted SAP or virtual datacenter implementation allows every CSP to deliver more value instead of just provisioning resources in Azure.

Interested in the new feature?Getting started with Azure Costs for CSPs is very easy, just visit our csp portal for Cloud Solution providers and enroll into the CSP program as described above. More information about every feature in detail and the available plans can be found here.